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Music in Everyday Life

The power of music to influence mood and create scenes, routines and occasions is widely recognized and this is reflected in a strand of social theory from Plato to Adorno that portrays music as an influence on character, social structure and action. There have, however, been few attempts to specify this power empirically and to provide theoretically grounded accounts of music’s structuring properties in everyday experience. Music in Everyday Life uses a series of ethnographic studies – an aerobics class, karaoke evenings, music therapy sessions and the use of background music in the retail sector – as well as in-depth interviews to show how music is a constitutive feature of human agency. Drawing together concepts from psychology, sociology and socio-linguistics, it develops a theory of music’s active role in the construction of personal and social life and highlights the aesthetic dimension of social order and organization in late modern societies.

T D N is senior lecturer at the University of Exeter. She received the International Sociological Association’s ‘Young Sociologist’ award in 1994 and is the author of Beethoven and the Construction of Genius (1995) as well as numerous journal articles.

Music in Everyday Life

Tia DeNora

The Pitt Building, Trumpington Street, Cambridge, United Kingdom

The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge CB2 2RU, UK 40 West 20th Street, New York, NY 10011-4211, USA

477 Williamstown Road, Port Melbourne, VIC 3207, Australia Ruiz de Alarcón 13, 28014 Madrid, Spain

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© Tia DeNora 2004

First published in printed format 2000

ISBN 0-511-03523-3 eBook (Adobe Reader)

ISBN 0-521-62206-9 hardback

ISBN 0-521-62732-X paperback

To my parents

John DeNora and Shirley Wood Smith DeNora

xPreface and acknowledgements

as a powerful medium is strong. Over the past two years, nearly everyone I have spoken with about my research has had something to say on the subject of music’s powers in their own lives, even when they were sometimes bemused by my interest in such picayune matters as whether or not people listen to music while washing the dishes. Their comments, taken as a whole, point to music as a dynamic material, a medium for making, sustaining and changing social worlds and social activities. Perhaps sociomusical scholarship’s failure to recognize music’s powers is due more to the use of inappropriate models for conceptualizing the nature of those powers – too often, music is thought of as a stimulus capable of working independently of its circumstances of production, distribution and consumption.

In this book I take a di erent tack. I suggest that it is probably impossible to speak of music’s ‘powers’ abstracted from their contexts of use, though, within certain settings and in relation to particular types of actors, music’s e ects on action may be anticipated to varying degrees. Indeed, thinking about the nature of musical power can help to enrich the ways we think about other types of ‘human–non-human’ relations and the role played by other kinds of objects and materials within social life.

The question of how music works remains opaque. Perhaps because it is rarely pursued from the ‘ground level’ of social action, too much writing within the sociology of music – and cultural studies more widely – is abstract and ephemeral; there are very few close studies of how music is used and works as an ordering material in social life. In the course of conducting the research detailed in this book, I was struck repeatedly by just how much of what I observed in relation to music’s powers could simply not have been imagined in advance. It is ironic that, nearly without exception, discussions of music’s a ect have had little association with interactionist sociology’s abiding commitment to the fine-grained, exquisitely practical detail of everyday life, and its focus on lived experience and lay knowledge. A focus on music ‘in action’, as a dynamic material of structuration, has yet to be developed. Within the social sciences, as I discuss in the following chapters, it has been the psychologists who have led the way to an environmental approach for socio-musical studies. Within sociology, perhaps only Antoine Hennion’s studies of amateur musical practices (through in-depth interviews) come close.

In short, we have very little sense of how music features within social process and next to no data on how real people actually press music into action in particular social spaces and temporal settings. These are large issues, but are probably best advanced through attention to the so-called ‘small’ details illuminated by ethnographic and ethnohistorical research. Accordingly, the arguments developed in this book draw upon a series of

ethnographic investigations of music in daily life. This work included indepth interviews with women of di erent age groups in metropolitan areas and small towns in the United States and United Kingdom, and four ethnographies of music ‘in action’ within specific social settings. (These included participant observation in aerobic exercise classes, karaoke evenings and music therapy sessions, unobtrusive observation of music in the retail sector and interviews with personnel in all these settings.)

Referring to these studies, the first aim of this book is to document some of the many uses to which music is and can be put, and to describe a range of strategies through which music is mobilized as a resource for producing the scenes, routines, assumptions and occasions that constitute ‘social life’. Building upon these tasks, the second aim is to relocate music – as a type of aesthetic material – in relation to sociology’s project, to bring it closer to the discipline’s core concerns. Chapter 1 highlights music’s active role in social life and proposes a way of drawing together perspectives from the American production of culture tradition, British cultural studies and sub-cultural theory, and the so-called ‘grand’ approach to socio-musical studies as exemplified by Adorno. Developing the grounded perspective outlined in chapter 1, the second chapter outlines an interactionist conception of musical a ect that moves beyond conundrums concerning whether music’s a ect is ‘immanent’ or ‘attributed’. Chapter 3 begins to put this perspective into practice by examining music’s role in relation to the construction of the self, centring on music’s role as a technology of identity, emotion and memory. Chapter 4 considers the reflexive relationship between music and embodiment and develops an interdisciplinary perspective for investigating many of the ways in which the body – i.e., its physiological, micro-behavioural and motivational processes – may be understood to be ‘musically composed’. Chapter 5 considers the role played by music within social scenes and situations, and describes how music may be used and inadvertently serve to draw otherwise disparate individuals into temporary (albeit often recurrent) configurations of social order – situations, scenes and institutional relations. Finally, chapter 6 weaves together these di erent strands and argues that socio-musical studies deserve far greater prominence within the social sciences, where they may be of considerable assistance in articulating a theory of agency and its relation to culture. In the twenty-first century, at a time when aesthetic forms of ordering are increasingly prominent, and as organizations are increasingly concerned with producing agents as well as products, the aesthetic bases of social life are – or at least should be – relocated at the heart of sociology’s paradigm.

xii Preface and acknowledgements

Doing ethnographic research is always dependent upon the good will and help of others. I would therefore like to begin by thanking the fifty-two women who were kind enough to let me interview them in the United States and United Kingdom. I have promised them anonymity and have changed identifying details. But I hope none the less that they will recognize themselves in the discussions and transcripts and I hope I have been as true as I could be to the spirit of what they told me when we met.

I am also deeply grateful to the retail managers and sta (who must remain anonymous) who allowed their stores to be used as a setting for research and to the instructors and students in the various aerobics classes studied (in particular to Kate Burnison) for the generous help they gave. Creative music therapist Hazel Bailey kindly took time out from her busy schedule to give advice and talk about her work with mental-health and learning-disabled clients and Helen Tyler of the Nordo Robbins Music Therapy Centre in London graciously o ered advice and the use of the Centre’s library. Near the end of the project, conversations with sta nurse Helen Kirby of the Derriford Neonatal Intensive Care Unit got me thinking about music’s role in neonatology and I have taken inspiration from her ongoing practical work in that area. Thanks are due as well to ‘Karaoke Bob’, Exeter’s well-known karaoke M.C., who recounted a range of practical observations based on his long experience in the karaoke world.

I would like to thank my American academic ‘hosts’ during the fieldwork phase, James Webster of Cornell University’s Music Department and Vera Zolberg of the Sociology Department, the Graduate Faculty of the New School for Social Research. Jim and Vera not only made it possible for me to be based at their institutions while I conducted the American interviews described in this book, but were instrumental in helping me to connect with contacts and potential interviewees. For further help at the fieldwork stage I would like to thank Robert Alford, Judith Balfe, Lenore Coral, Carol Krumhansl, Trevor Pinch, David Rosen, Margaret Webster, Neil Zazlaw, Ellen Zazlaw and the members of the Music Colloquium, Cornell University for thoughtful comments and discussions. I would also like to thank the members of the Science Studies Seminar and the Project on Culture and Society at the University of California, San Diego. In particular I am grateful to Bennett Berger, Richard Madsen, Hugh Mehan, Chandra Mukerji and Jann Pasler for very stimulating discussions.

During the year of the project on music and daily life I had the pleasure of working with an exceptional research assistant, Sophie Belcher. I would like to record my thanks to Sophie and note that the presentation of empirical work used to illustrate the argument of this book, particularly

the section on aerobic exercise, was originally hammered out in our project meetings. I am also grateful to Sophie’s family members who o ered ideas and support and even, on one occasion, allowed us to study their ‘shopping behaviour’. Thanks to: Perry Belcher, Kate and Simon Shattuck and Michele Anning. I would also like to thank Tessa Stone for help in contacting interviewees in London.

I am also grateful to the following for discussion and comments on the manuscript and for practical help at di erent stages in the research process: Paul Atkinson, Sara Delamont, Simon Frith, Sharon Hays, Antoine Hennion, Stevi Jackson, Pete Martin, Jo McDonagh, Sharon Macdonald, Frankie Peroni, Susan C. Scott, Robin Wagner-Pacifici, Kees van Rees, John Sloboda, Paul Sweetman, Anna Lisa Tota and my sociology of art collaborator here at Exeter, Robert Witkin. In addition, two anonymous reviewers for Cambridge University Press were very helpful, and I am grateful to the second reviewer who, at the last stages of writing, directed me to newly translated essays by Adorno on the sociology of music. I would also like to thank my editor at Cambridge, Sarah Caro, for her help and enthusiasm for the project, and the copy-editor, Katy Cooper, for her impeccable talent for producing clarity. I also wish to thank Catherine Max, who was involved with the project at Cambridge University Press in its early stages. Finally, I am, as ever, deeply grateful to my husband, Douglas Tudhope, who read and discussed the manuscript with me and helped me to see the relevance to the sociology of the arts of his own area of research, ‘Human–computer Interaction’. Thanks, too, to audiences at the BSA, ASA, ESA and ISA meetings and to seminar groups at the universities of Cardi , York, Surrey, Southampton and Milan.

The research for this book was supported by the Economic and Social Research Council of Great Britain (‘Human–music Interaction – Music’s “E ects” on Feeling, Embodiment and Temporality’ (R000237013)). I would like to thank my colleagues in the Department of Sociology at the University of Exeter for the rotating study-leave plan that allowed me to complete this book, and Mary Guy, Nicki Barwick and Linda Tolly for their meticulous transcriptions of the taped interviews. Parts of chapters 3 and 5 draw on material previously published in Poetics and Sociological Review.